but what if's change nothing
by acidhu3s
Summary: Agent 8 tries her best, but in the end she is still a person, too. (sequel to 'if atlas sleeps, the sky will fall.' f/f 24)


Three treads the line between peculiar and damaged.

There's a certain charm to her, one that drew Eight in to begin with. She's withdrawn and quiet and so very passive, but there's a biting fondness to her humor that made Eight notice her in the first place. Yet, at the same time, she never really held up a conversation, so it was mostly Four or Eight that talked whenever around her. Months of gentle coaxing and soft smiles got her to where she is now. She isn't much better, but she smiles.

At first, Eight thought Three was so irreversibly worn-down that she couldn't smile at all.

To Eight, Three seems mechanical. Rehearsed. Repeated, a machine, as if every day and every interaction is clockwork and she's just _dying_ to avoid it all. Sometimes Eight wonders if Three feels anything at all, if she's something beyond the murderous Agent 3, the Liberator, but then there are times when she laughs and looks so carefree, so happy, that it isn't hard to believe that she's just seventeen and _normal._ And then it's as if she remembers what she is, what she's been shaped and molded and _forced_ into, and millennia after millennia of conflict and turmoil, physical and emotional and everything in-between, comes crashing down in suffocating waves, and she's back to being the withdrawn, shambling shell she shouldn't be.

(When Eight confessed to her with a bouquet of stolen azaleas from the neighbor's lawn, it was the first time she heard Three laugh. It was sharp and obnoxious like a knife on a glass bottle, and Eight had never heard something so wonderful.)

"Why don't you just leave the NSS?" Eight asks while holding her hand, tracing small circles into it. "The Octarians, they... They've calmed down, haven't they? Aren't they working on treaties and everything?"

Three sighs and Eight fears she'll waste away.

"I wish I could," she mumbles in a voice that's ten times flatter than usual. "I really, really wish I could."

"Then do it," Eight says, because it hurts so much to see Three like this, the shell of a shell of a ghost that's nearly faded. It hurts knowing she can count the amount of times she's seen Three smile on one hand. The pain that shoots through her when she looks into Three's eyes and she finds nothing but dulled apathy and washed-out guilt is enough to make Eight question why she stays, why she sticks by Three anyways, because it hurts and hurts and it _hurts,_ but there are brief moments of sun and brief moments of happiness and smiles of blinding radiance that remind her why she does.

"It's not that simple," Three mutters in response.

"What if it was?" Eight finds herself asking before she can stop herself.

Three turns away from the TV to meet Eight's gaze, and there's something crushed and broken and stomped on in her eyes that Eight can't even begin to identify.

"It wouldn't ever be," she replies bluntly. "'What if's don't help anyone. There's no use in thinking about them."

"... Sorry," Eight whispers, clearing her throat.

"Why are you crying?" Three asks, letting go of Eight's hand to wipe away one of her tears. Eight swats the hand away before her thumb touches her cheek.

"It's dust," she snaps, getting up hastily. "I- I just have to blow my nose, I'm fine."

"Eight?" she hears Three call after her as she storms off. "Hey! Eight..!"

(_What if you were happy? _she wants to ask, but the words are lodged in her throat like glass in intestines.)

There is a naive part of Eight that thinks it can change Three, that it can make her smile permanent and not a fleeting half-moment of a memory, but Eight knows by now that it's useless.

Because there are times when Eight truly thinks she hates Three, that Three is a waste of her time, and then there are times when Eight hates herself for ever thinking that, because Three is so much more damaged, more beaten, more _broken_ than anyone else she's met. She wishes Three would get help, that Three would see a professional, that she would quit her job at the NSS, because her youth is wasting and fading away almost as fast as _Three _is. Because Eight wants Three to able to look back at the moments she spent with Eight when she's older (_if_ she's older) and find something to smile at. She wants Three to look back and remember the soft fabric of a penguin plush or the gentle scent of azaleas stolen from Pearl's neighbor's lawn, not the stench of cigarettes and the stinging pain of burnt flesh, not dead eyes staring back in the mirror before going back to bed and wasting the day away.

Eight wants Three to be happy.

But wants and wishes and 'what if's change nothing, and that is a fact of life.

(Five minutes later, and Eight re-enters the living room. Three is curled up in a ball in the corner of the couch. Her face is dry, her eyes dull yet not bloodshot. _"I'm sorry," _Eight tells her, and all Three does is stare.)

(Maybe, if Three had tears left to cry, she would.)

(It's not like it matters.)


End file.
